


Turning Darkness to Light

by Farla



Category: Meta - Fandom, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Gen, Meta, Mystacor, Season 1, Speculation, the horde
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-25
Updated: 2019-04-25
Packaged: 2020-01-31 21:33:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18599830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Farla/pseuds/Farla
Summary: Speculation on She-Ra's plot based on S1. What's meta without being wrong about stuff, after all?





	Turning Darkness to Light

With the second season arriving, this is my last chance to be wrong based on just S1 so I felt I should write out speculation. It's all well and good to look back over things and formulate theories once you have the full picture, but there's a certain delight to guessing and going off on tangents. This is a mix of what I think is plausible and what strikes me as interesting, backed up as much as I can with specific characterization or plot notes we've seen so far.

So.

Adora:

Adora tried to make a sharp break with the Horde. I'm certain this isn't the usual sweeping it under the rug - we still have Adora saying things that are obviously bad based on her Horde upbringing (Glimmer definitely shouldn't tell her mom she's sick!) and we have everyone Adora used to know in the Horde calling her out for acting like she can just switch sides and pretend the rest of her life never happened.

Adora's avoided talking about her life before the rebellion and almost all her interactions with them have been when Glimmer and Bow were nowhere around. Despite Adora's efforts, she did tell them some basics about Shadow Weaver but avoided almost all of the context, so right now, the only person they know she knew in the Horde is a terrible person she escaped from. People have been talking about her being black and white in her thinking and she is, but I think it's more about being a people-pleaser. The princess side either doesn't really understand how little choice people in the Horde have or don't care, and Adora seems to be trying to mirror the attitude we see from Angella and Glimmer that everyone in the Horde must be terrible. She also spent the season just thinking around the problem of Catra - offering to let Catra come join the rebellion without considering the contradiction between "Catra's not bad, she's just stuck there" and "everyone in the Horde is evil and must be stopped". You can also see Adora really not wanting to have new thoughts during the Promise episode - as Catra is seeing everything in a new light, Adora's just huh, those sure are some things that happened.

Catra's now tried to kill her and blow up all her new friends. Since god knows Adora's not going to want to talk anyone about that, presumably she'll just remove the exception she had for Catra and go to all of the Horde is terrible and she fights them - and that's fine with Light Hope given shutting up and not having feelings is exactly what Light Hope wants out of She-Ra, so she'll get at least one person intentionally fanning the flames. I'm guessing Catra or Glimmer/Bow/another princess-side character will need to have a conversation to progress this plotline. Either Adora tries to answer Catra in kind and throws her off a cliff/some other near-fatal end to a fight, and then has a breakdown that leads to her explaining anything at all to anyone else at all, or Catra manages to ambush Adora and vent long enough for Adora to figure something out. (It would also be very entertaining if someone else finally sees Catra and Adora having one of their horrible bad breakup fights and crowbars an explanation out of Adora.) I'm basically guessing whatever happens to progress this will be due to someone else, with Adora digging in her heels and fighting any further character development with all her might. She really doesn't like changing her mind on anything.

(Also a possibility, She-Ra does something to another member of her old friends. Kyle is the most obvious person to accidentally throw off a cliff, so I'd actually put in a bet for Lonnie - hasn't been telegraphed as vulnerable, is the only other one to have shown she holds a grudge for Adora abandoning and replacing them, willing to fight Adora and presumably She-Ra.)

We also still have the elephant in the room where we know original Adora was stolen as a kid because of her special destiny so it's probably not a coincidence the Horde grabbed her this time around. Adora keeps trying to follow the thread of her destiny but there's no sign she even suspects there was any intentional meddling. Light Hope also hasn't brought it up, which may be because Light Hope is just too single-minded but could be that she thinks Adora is going to take it really badly when she finds out and doesn't want She-Ra messed up with any more emotional baggage.

Glimmer:

Glimmer is the only one we have seen make any plans for the future, fighting-wise, with the fact she's been stockpiling weapons. Good job, Glimmer! I wouldn't be surprised if she's tried to do other stuff as well and her mom shut her down. My hope is that she ends up getting to make proper plans and defenses. We know she has issues with how she's not taken seriously and we also know she has issues with feeling like nobody likes her. Being more assertive as an actual leader would be good progress for her, and we did end S1 with her mom realizing she needs to let Glimmer run the rebellion. Also, she spent the finale fighting despite her powers not only being broken but actively hampering her and she's friends with the only regular person we've met who has any real drive. Possibly she and Swift Wind can work out that maybe things would work better if the people under attack had weapons and basic training instead of hoping a princess will just happen to be there whenever things go wrong.

Bow:

We know Bow's issue is that everyone relies on princesses. His inventions are some weirdo nerd hobby only other weirdo nerd hobbyists appreciate while even his closest friends feel free to mock his ideas. When he meets people like him, they're cowering and talking about how they can't do anything. Also, he may be just a bit upset to discover his inventor idol switched sides and nearly got him and everyone he loves killed. Bow is interesting in that he's very good natured and nice to people but he also doesn't trust them. In the opening, he's the one willing to treat Horde Soldier Adora kindly but also assume she totally betrayed them as soon as things go badly. I'm hoping we see more of that part of his personality because it's a lot more nuance than you usually get from the kind character literally wearing a heart.

Also curious if what happened with Kyle will have any fallout. It was a good idea at the time but the kind that burns bridges, and it does seem like a good example of how everyone on the princess side seems to be avoiding thinking about how the Horde works.

Swift Wind:

I hope the She-Ra'd lizard returns and becomes either his sidekick or his nemesis, and also that he keeps getting up to stuff off-camera and by S5 he has a liberated horsey army. He may also be useful for giving more people a kick in the pants to stop whining and get to work, since he seems to be the only one besides Adora who understands that sometimes you just have to do your best with what you've got and unlike Adora, he's willing to tell other people to do the same.

The other princesses:

We saw them completely give up the moment anything went wrong. They came back when Bright Moon was attacked, but does this mean they actually got over it or is the alliance still going to only hold as long as She-Ra makes sure nothing else ever goes wrong? Also, will Adora and the rest think the alliance is a solved issue or work themselves to the bone trying to keep the other princesses onboard? Will they avoid calling in their allies when they really need them because they're worried if anyone is there when they fail they'll lose all the other princesses for good?

Something I found interesting was that Angella says that Micah was one of the first lost, meaning they managed to keep going for some time and numerous other losses before finally coming apart. There haven't been any actual deaths on the show so far, so I'm assuming we won't actually watch princesses getting cut down, but it would be really contrived if the second alliance is never tested again. They'll have to at least think they lost someone and come through anyway to prove they're actually committed this time - possibly, they'll lose Adora herself, since that's about the worst blow to their confidence they can have, or possibly something like Frosta's kingdom being attacked and taken over because she's visibly supporting Bright Moon. It'd be nice to see some reason why the other kingdoms seem to want to be considered neutral so badly.

So far, we haven't had much of a moral component to people's decisions. We know the way Etheria is supposed to work is the princesses protect it. We know that isn't how things are.

It seems it'd have been so easy to avoid any questions. The simplest setup is that everyone is busy fighting alone and the hero comes by and fixes enough to give them breathing room - ie, people want to but are unable to do more until a problem's resolved. Slightly more complex would be that some people don't realize the problem exists and the hero has to fix that. What we've seen in She-Ra, however, has consistently been people knowing things are very bad but still choosing not to fight. Plumeria feels she isn't strong enough to win so she won't do anything at all. Mermista says other people didn't help her so she won't help them. Entrapta doesn't care. Frosta thinks it's not her problem. In each case, the solution has been to do them a favor that they feel obligated to repay.

This seems really discordant to me and I'm suspicious of it, especially when we keep seeing ordinary people get hurt and when both Glimmer and Razz make it clear that this should be the responsibility of princesses. I wouldn't expect a show based around magic princesses to go against the basic princess setup so my guess is there's going to be some "with great power comes great responsibility" realization, possibly tied to whatever problem the alliance as a whole has to weather.

Mystacor:

I have no idea if their part in this ended at "oh yeah, Shadow Weaver was from here". The basics of the story we got don't paint them in a particularly good light - they trained Shadow Weaver, put her in charge long enough to put up a statue, they kicked her out, they never paid attention to anything she did again. It's possible it's barebones because it just won't come up, but I really hope it's because the story's incomplete. Mystacor is one of the only two links we have between the culture of the abusive, dysfunctional Horde and the fluffy, well-adjusted good-guy side.

I really doubt it'll turn out Mystacor was cacklingly evil about this. The Light Weaver statue has visible damage, so at some point people had some very strong opinions about her. My best guess is Mystacor is downplaying how much choice they had in what happened and it was really more, "We tried to stop her, she escaped, and we lost track of her, and that sounds really bad so we're going to pretend we meant to do that." Less likely but more interestingly, they did choose to expel her. I'm assuming even they wouldn't think to let her go with all her powers, so either they were stripped from her or she'd wrecked them in whatever takeover attempt she made, and they thought she'd be harmless without them and didn't need further oversight. We also don't know the timeline, so I'd say it's very possible they think she's dead (they may well have kept track of her and then she disappeared) which would fit with Castaspella talking about her like she's an imaginary boogieman at this point. That'd mean they can be held accountable as part of the bad decision chain (exile is not a good punishment! it is either cowardice or overkill and usually both at once!) that led to the current day, but it'd be understandable how it happened.

Which brings us to the Horde side of things.

Catra:

While I do not think we're going to end with her a villain, she's probably going to be one for most of the show, and that means things are going to get a lot worse first.

She may ultimately make a bid to backstab Hordak but I can't imagine that happening early either. She tries absolutely everything she can to get along with Shadow Weaver and even in their final confrontation she lets Shadow Weaver force the issue instead. From what little we've seen of Hordak he appears to be the socially competent version of Shadow Weaver. Even if he's sadistic enough to mistreat Catra for the sake of it, as long as he can clear the bar of being nicer than Shadow Weaver Catra will assume this is what approval feels like.

A very strange element of Catra in S1 is that she's strongly empathetic. It's most obvious when it comes to interactions with Scorpia and Entrapta, where her attempts at manipulation always involve finding common ground between how they feel and how she's felt, but it's most telling with Shadow Weaver, who she has a million reasons to not care hurting about but whose feelings she seems keenly aware of. She says Shadow Weaver's mad all her power comes from Hordak - and both the fact and the emotion are backed up by the later episodes. She reaches out for Shadow Weaver when Shadow Weaver gets backlash from a horrifying attack on her, she interrupts her gloating and switches to attempted reassurance when she sees Shadow Weaver looks pained and tired - and this after the worst interaction they had, when Shadow Weaver had announced she'd be demoted and she retaliated by giving Adora the sword.

But if Catra flinches away from hurting even people who've give her ample reason to hate them, she's going to have difficulty leading the Horde and it's very clear she's committed to that. She's either going to have to avoid confronting what she's doing (she is, after all, fine blowing things up in theory) or she's going to have to throw away that part of her. Quite likely it'll be first one and then the other.

Unfortunately for Adora, this doesn't apply to her! I sincerely don't think at this point that Catra believes Adora can be hurt. Catra grew up knowing Shadow Weaver was fallible and human because it's hard to miss the fallout every time her magic goes wrong but Adora's always come up smelling like roses no matter what. It's not just Catra getting punished when Adora didn't. Catra never outdoes her in training and any time she might someone else helps out Adora. Even when she's sabotaging the entire group by coming in late in the first episode and purposefully not warning Adora she's about to fall, Adora gets commended. And Adora might be mildly peeved but she never gets that upset about it either. Then Adora flat-out leaves, and the only issue is getting her back. Catra keeps trying to cover for her and Adora doesn't even need it. Then Adora makes it clear that she left Catra, and apparently Adora's fine without her and already has new friends. Then it turns out Shadow Weaver knows Adora's a princess, and still, the only issue is getting her back. Then Catra's plan is the one to get her back and all that means is that Adora, currently tied to a slab saying she's only here because of her incredible loyalty to another rebel princess, gets to replace Catra as force captain. Then there's a whole building of monsters that only want to kill Catra because Adora's supposed to be there. And if she had any doubt, well, she managed to drop Adora off a cliff and look, Adora's fine. She carves up Adora and look, Adora won anyway.

Similar to Adora's denial, Catra's probably not going to rethink this one easily and it's not like Adora's going to want to admit weakness. Possibly Catra just won't deal with this at all and she'll only stop trying to murder Adora because she's joined the same side and no longer wants to murder Adora. Otherwise...well, given that cliff-dropping and mauling, whatever it'd take to convince Catra Adora's meaningfully hurt is going to be awful. I'd say the only way out of this without putting Adora through a wringer would be Catra falls into another string of memory-holograms that have that agenda.

On the princess front, I sincerely hope that's not going to happen, if only because answering Catra's inferiority issues by giving her something doesn't seem like a real fix. Catra's current focus is trying to be equal to Adora but I think it's important this doesn't seem to have been an issue before Adora left her. Before that, she accepts that other people like Adora better so long as Adora likes her better. She's thrilled Adora was promoted and views it as progress for them, right until Adora says that there is no them this time, Catra is going to be her subordinate but stay Shadow Weaver's. Within a day, Catra was first abandoned in favor of a promotion and then that promotion apparently meant so little Adora then abandons that to join the rebellion.

If she's a princess, I'd guess that's just going to make things worse the way every attempt Catra's made to prove she's as good as Adora has. It'd also be more interesting if she got the runestone connection without being secretly royalty in particular (if nothing else, we've seen the runestones are hackable), since that'd be a twist on the setup.

Shadow Weaver:

Other people have pointed out the parallels between her and Catra, right down to how Catra mimics her when trying to get back at Adora. It's noteworthy that she seems to be in a pretty bad position herself - Catra is bad-mouthing her as only having power through Hordak and saying it's something "everyone knows" and when she tries to bring Catra to Hordak as a punishment, he undermines her as thoroughly as possible by giving Catra a promotion instead. And we know she hates Hordak right back from how she speaks pleasantly only to scream with rage the moment the feed cuts out. The big difference between her and Catra so far is that Catra doesn't appear to pass the misery down to the next link in the chain. Catra isn't on good terms with the rest of the squad...so she shows off her promotion and then doesn't do much else to them.

We don't know Shadow Weaver's side of things on Mystacor beyond that she really did not make much of a case for them being wrong about it when she was trying to convince Adora to give up and rejoin the Horde. S2 will likely establish if she was using the Black Garnet to supercharge her magic or if the Black Garnet was needed to replace her powers. I'm guessing the former just because it means she'll be more able to cause trouble even without the stone.

I find it very interesting that Shadow Weaver makes no attempt to justify recapturing Adora by pointing out she's She-Ra even though, as I said in Adora's section, it seems like that's the entire reason the Horde grabbed her. Knowing she's a princess and knowing Shadow Weaver can rewrite her memory, it seems like recapturing her is a actually the tactically sound choice. Instead, Shadow Weaver seems to do everything she can to cover it up. That makes me think Shadow Weaver is the only one who knew what was up with Adora. She really hates Hordak personally or the fact she's not in charge, probably both. She can't take him out on her own given she hasn't so far. She-Ra, though... And this would explain why Adora does not seem to have been properly propagandized. There are many lies you could tell to make someone think destroying an obviously civilian village was necessary and Adora didn't know a single one. In fact, Shadow Weaver seems to have gone out of her way to tell her things that don't fit Thaymor at all so it'd be immediately obvious something was wrong, and we also know there's other outposts that with other force captains that aren't doing anything obviously evil - you could just assign Adora to whatever group is busy destroying the woods.

I don't think the answer is constant mindwipes - if she was capable of it and thought it was a good idea, it'd be happening constantly already, but any previous mindwipes have been rare enough Catra never picked up on them (Hard to be outraged someone's "just figured it out" if you know the last dozen times they figured something out they got dragged off for some magically aided unfiguring it out.). It's also just an incredibly stupid risky plan, even with Shadow Weaver's poor grasp of how people work. Even if most of the time, Adora finishes the mission but comes back upset long enough to erase that, sooner or later she'll run off or throw a fit in the field, and you'd also have to mindwipe her every time the people around her start sharing stories about how fun shooting unarmed people in the back was.

So my guess is Shadow Weaver's plan was for Adora to be upset. Either in a relatively subtle way where she'd make excuses that slowly implied the problem was Hordak or just "Oh no Hordak, currently in his throne room I take you to every Tuesday, is evil? Oh but Adora you must not stab him repeatedly with your new sword, even if that is the only thing that'll save that other village that's going to be burnt down in five minutes..."

Hordak:

We've seen very little of this guy but it's been competent so far. He allows Shadow Weaver to raise kids, knowing she'll abuse them into hating her instead of building a real power base, then gets their loyalty once they're already trained and useful by being mean to her and slightly approving of them.

I'm curious what impact Mara had on his plans. It would make a lot of sense if saving the planet from the Horde fleet was why she moved it. It seems like he arrived recently, though I wouldn't rule out time working weirdly because of a gravity well or something. Certainly the fact he crashed suggests something went wrong on his end. If the Horde is supposed to be part of something bigger and he's currently cut off, does he want to try to reconnect or is he happy to no longer have to answer to anyone? The latter makes more sense to me, but the former adds an extra concern - if Hordak isn't stopped, he's going to call the rest of them down on the planet. (Also, it could be he's not currently trying to get back in contact but when he starts to lose he'll choose to call for help.)

Scorpia:

Scorpia's kingdom is the only other connection we have between the princesses and the Horde.

I maintain something is really up with the story she tells about her kingdom. It's possible the point is just that Scorpia's whole family are overly trusting nice people who handed their runestone over easily, but the elements imply something bad happened.

1) They were already on bad terms with the other kingdoms.  
2) Hordak didn't travel around and find eventually kindred spirits in their kingdom, they're where his ship lands.  
3) They do not appear to have any important rank in the Horde.  
4) Giving up a runestone is permanently disarming yourself.

Even Scorpia's very bubbly description includes her talking about how Hordak turns around and regifts the Black Garnet after he gets it from them - ie, her family had no say in what happened to it and seem uncomfortable given the distinction she's making about it getting passed along.

So my guess is it was a lot closer to terms of surrender. We know that in the present day, even close kingdoms don't interact or get help from each other, and this is after the Horde has made it clear they're everyone's problem. The current A-plot is about how important it is for the princesses to be friends and work together. It's very fitting, then, if the reason they're in this mess in the first place is they decided they didn't care what was happening because nobody liked those people anyway, or even that they thought Hordak might be an improvement.

It'd also help with the problem that so far things have been very much color-coded. The mammal and angel people are with the rebellion, the lizard and scorpion and octopus people are with the Evil Horde. The good guys are all beautiful, Shadow Weaver is horribly disfigured and Hordak is some sort of scary cyborg.

I should add something that occurs to me is that Scorpia says that her being a princess is covered in the orientation Catra missed. The running joke of it covers the fact it would actually be really telling if we knew how exactly that was described. We know on the cadet level, there's no "all princesses are terrible except our buddy Scorpia here", but Scorpia makes it clear she's used to everyone around her knowing. She's also friendless and does not seem to have a team like a force captain should, and she's the one Shadow Weaver thought was the best choice for a mission behind Hordak's back. Is the orientation, "Hey, here's Scorpia, she's a princess but it's cool, she's one of the good ones."? Or is it, "Also, remember to keep an eye on Scorpia, she's a princess who hasn't gone nuts yet but, y'know, it's probably just a matter of time."?

Entrapta:

Let's be real, she was just as morally ambiguous before she joined the Horde. I don't think she'll take it well if she thinks Catra lied to her about her friends, but Catra doesn't currently know and I'm dubious Entrapta would be willing to believe Catra did know without evidence (though she might on the basis Catra's calling the shots and seems competent). What seems most possible is Catra finding out what really happened then trying to cover it up and having Entrapta out at that point. Entrapta carries around a recorder, is out of sight all the time, and may have microphones on the robots. Alternatively, Catra just says something else Entrapta overhears that's along the lines of not being friends/using Entrapta, since the real issue is just the hurt of being betrayed by someone she thought cared about her.

Personally I'd say Entrapta's flaws are already about being pretty self-centered, so I'd rather whatever goes down with Entrapta doesn't get into whether she's being used by the Horde or tricked or whatnot. Entrapta's first episode is her endangering people because she wanted to experiment. She ends the episode trying to restart the experiment. She's now with the Horde because she can experiment, and her last experiment nearly destroyed the planet. If Entrapta is going to cut ties with the Horde it should be because she starts to care more about the fallout of her experiments than doing the experiment.

Having fallout over whether or not Catra is her friend or just using her seems likely, especially given Catra seems unwilling to admit she likes anyone these days, but it should be a drama that goes down while Entrapta is still at the Horde and they have to work through it.

Adora's other old friends:

I really think they're well positioned to twist the knife somehow. Something bad happening to the people Adora grew up with only to abandon and then turn against for the sake of her new friends is going to hurt, especially if she's the one who does it.

They're also likely targets if Catra decides she needs to be even more like Shadow Weaver.

I think it'd be most interesting if the group partly defects. The obvious split would be Kyle leaving given he's made it clear he's not happy and not good at this while Lonnie is like Catra in that she seems to believe the solution is to work hard within the Horde so it's worth it. On the other hand, Lonnie more likely possesses the self-esteem to think she could leave, and having the more useful member of the group leave would probably have the best fallout.

At the moment, Rogelio presumably goes/stays based on Kyle, but I'd like it if he got character development/actual lines and stuff, enough that he makes his own decision instead.

...well, out of time. Feel free to tell me I'm wrong once you've seen S2 or just because you see something that's already wrong just from what you noticed in S1, I'll get back to you whenever I finish it myself.


End file.
